Fundraising the Smart Way, + Website: Predictable, Consistent Income Growth for Your Charity - Hardcover

by Ellen Bristol (Author)

Strategic planning and tactical fundraising can maximize income and minimize costs

Fundraising is the lifeblood of the nonprofit, and, successful or otherwise, determines the organization's ability to provide for the group it serves. Every organization attempts to lower overhead while increasing donations, but this often proves to be impossible within existing frameworks. Effective fundraising - increasing donations while engaging more donors and lowering costs - requires a sound strategy that turns major roadblocks into minor hurdles that are easily overcome. It's not about trying harder, it's about working smarter.

Fundraising the SMART Way provides the groundwork for a complete revamp of organizational fundraising systems. Author Ellen Bristol applies twenty years of corporate sales experience and eighteen years in fund development consultation to the problem of inefficient fundraising. Bristol turns her extensive sales expertise toward the perspective of "selling" an organization to potential donors, increasing the donor pool, and lowering the cost of fundraising. The book details the questions every nonprofit should be asking to maximize the effectiveness of fundraising efforts, and encourages systematic strategy development by zeroing in on key factors such as:

• Organizational goals, strengths, and weaknesses
• Donor actions and motivations
• Workload management and results QA
• Opportunity evaluation and organizational action

The book outlines clear, concrete, actionable steps that can be immediately implemented to escalate income growth. Effective fundraising is sustainable, consistent, and on-target. It must exceed current need and expand to fill future need. Fundraising the SMART Way represents a true breakthrough in that it lays a foundation for true systemic overhaul, and can be the catalyst for the growth of any nonprofit.

Front Jacket

A part of the acclaimed AFP Fund Development Series, Fundraising the SMART Way(TM) + Website describes in detail a formal methodology that provides the management controls so sorely needed to acquire and sustain funding in a significantly more rational, objective, and productive manner. These techniques don't merely fix problems; they also open the door to innovation. This book is about revolutionizing the fundraising function through the classic elements and disciplines of performance, or as its often called, process management. Author Ellen Bristol built on the successful foundations of Six Sigma and LEAN methodologies to create The SMART Way(TM), a set of business rules, guidelines, performance metrics, and other management controls that provide measurable improvements in sales profitability. Her system is now fundamentally changing the way nonprofits and other organizations approach fundraising.

The SMART Way(TM) model establishes two critical components that tend to be ignored, overlooked, or under-valued. When you can document and quantify these two components, capture data against them, and then cross-reference the data, you will be far more capable of maintaining high levels of productivity, management control, visibility, and accountability for all engaged in the fundraising effort, including peer solicitors and even donors themselves. Here are the two critical components:

• The Ideal-Funder Profile: a benchmark for each category of funder (donor, grant maker, corporate giver) that lists factual, quantitative characteristics of your ideal funder; qualitative or values-based characteristics; and the danger signs that suggest that some donors, assuming you were to win them over, may cost more than they are worth. A complex benchmark of this nature provides clear guidelines about which donors justify the most investment of time and effort, and which do not. In the SMART Way(TM) model, we call such profiles Scorecards.

• The Donor Moves: milestones that locate the gift/grant opportunity in the pipeline based on the donor's giving process, rather than your team's getting process. Virtually all gifts and grants evolve through a short, predictable, unvarying series of milestones that provide effective performance indicators, both leading and trailing.

Fundraising the SMART Way(TM) + Website will teach you to wrap your organizational arms and minds around the persistently stormy nature of the fund-development climate, and how to prevent tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornados in favor of balmy breezes and warm climes, a fund development world where what you want to happen, happens.

Back Jacket

Start a fundraising revolution within your organization

A part of the acclaimed AFP Fund Development Series, Fundraising the SMART Way(TM) + Website describes in detail a formal methodology that provides the management controls so sorely needed to acquire and sustain funding in a significantly more rational, objective, and productive manner. These techniques don't merely fix problems; they also open the door to innovation. This book is about revolutionizing the fundraising function through the classic elements and disciplines of performance, or as its often called, process management. Author Ellen Bristol built on the successful foundations of Six Sigma and LEAN methodologies to create The SMART Way(TM), a set of business rules, guidelines, performance metrics, and other management controls that provide measurable improvements in sales profitability. Her system is now fundamentally changing the way nonprofits and other organizations approach fundraising.

The SMART Way(TM) model establishes two critical components that tend to be ignored, overlooked, or under-valued. When you can document and quantify these two components, capture data against them, and then cross-reference the data, you will be far more capable of maintaining high levels of productivity, management control, visibility, and accountability for all engaged in the fundraising effort, including peer solicitors and even donors themselves. Here are the two critical components:

• The Ideal-Funder Profile: a benchmark for each category of funder (donor, grant maker, corporate giver) that lists factual, quantitative characteristics of your ideal funder; qualitative or values-based characteristics; and the danger signs that suggest that some donors, assuming you were to win them over, may cost more than they are worth. A complex benchmark of this nature provides clear guidelines about which donors justify the most investment of time and effort, and which do not. In the SMART Way(TM) model, we call such profiles Scorecards.
• The Donor Moves: milestones that locate the gift/grant opportunity in the pipeline based on the donor's giving process, rather than your team's getting process. Virtually all gifts and grants evolve through a short, predictable, unvarying series of milestones that provide effective performance indicators, both leading and trailing.

Fundraising the SMART Way(TM) + Website will teach you to wrap your organizational arms and minds around the persistently stormy nature of the fund-development climate, and how to prevent tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornados in favor of balmy breezes and warm climes, a fund development world where what you want to happen, happens.

Author Biography

ELLEN BRISTOL came into the nonprofit sector after more than twenty years of experience in the corporate world where she specialized in major-account sales of information technology equipment. Since 1995, the year she launched Bristol Strategy Group, she has developed a solid track record as a consultant and author in the fund development arena.